Go Low

Going low, for photographers, is not a metaphor for slinging unfair personal attacks against an adversary.  It’s about the physicality of taking an image, and it means getting your camera close to the ground. Interesting stuff happens down there.

Take a look at this shot of a pedestrian bridge I took the other day standing at one end of the bridge. 

Yes, it’s a yawner (a “pedestrian” shot in more ways than one). But look what happens when I lowered the camera and rested it right on the bridge planks. (And waited for some actors to come onto my stage …  See my blog post Finding a Stage.)

Much better, right?  Not a prize winner, to be sure, but with the camera at ground level, the bridge railings now fill both sides of the image and their converging lines bring the viewer’s eye directly to the subjects walking on the path.

Let’s look at the same idea with some of my Monumental Washington images.  Check out this Reflecting Pool image with the Washington Monument in the background, taken just before an icy winter sunrise.

The long gray horizontal line that bisects the right side of the image is the top of the granite coping that lines the perimeter of the Reflecting Pool.  See how it’s right at eye level?   The irregular thin  line below it, which starts at the bottom right corner of the image, is the glint of light where the edge of the water hits the stone.  Both these lines converge in the middle distance, taking your eye to the Washington Monument and the U.S. Capitol dome. For the record, it’s 676 yards from where the camera sits at the west edge of the pool to east edge of the pool where the lines disappear.

Here’s another monument, built 1,900 years before the Washington Monument: the Pantheon in Rome.

I put the camera at the level of the second step up from the street cobblestones on the right. You can see how the steps formed a set of lines that take your eye from the lower right of the image directly to the entrance of the ancient temple in the middle of the shot.

It’s not just leading lines that become prominent with the camera down low. Here’s an image I took at the Eisenhower Memorial, across the street from the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum.

These are soldiers listening to Eisenhower’s D-Day pep talk. My idea in getting low was to convey a mood of foreboding, with the shadows on the wall and the figures looming above the camera.  Getting down to the level of the soldiers’ boots helped do that.

Do you like to take photos of churches on vacation? Going low works well for both inside and outside shots. Here are two churches in northern Spain:

The interior view is a church in Laguardia, Spain. Notice how the seats of the pews are above the camera’s eye level? This low angle also helped accentuate the geometry of the pews – just like in our pedestrian bridge shot at the top of this blog post – which lead the viewer to the spectacular altar screen topped by the scallop shell of St. James. (The person standing in the aisle is a little blurry from upper-body motion and a slow 3-second shutter speed.)  

The second shot is the famous cathedral in Santiago de Compostello. The cobblestones directly in front of the camera lead the eye to the church, which enjoys dramatic night lighting.  

Getting to ground level is also great for taking pictures of exercisers. Here are a couple from the Watergate Steps, just west of the Lincoln Memorial. I’m standing on the steps below the subjects.

Of course, you don’t always have a handy set of steps nearby that let you get a low angle shot without even bending over.  Most of the time, you have to get onto the ground. 

Not merely on your knees.  

For a kneeling photographer, a camera at eye level is still three or four feet off the ground. It’s those last few inches getting your lens down to ground level that make for a memorable viewing angle.

The gear can help.  The low-light shots that I favor usually need a tripod for a long exposure. And a good tripod, either a full-sized one or a miniature table top tripod, can splay itself so that the head is flat onto the ground. 

Many modern cameras also come with tilting displays that let you stick the camera onto the ground, then crouch over it with the display angled upward. That saves you from having to plant your chin onto the dirt.

No two ways about it, though. 

Whether you’re crouching above a camera on the ground, or flopped onto your belly peering through the viewfinder, you have to get that camera onto actual terra firma if you really want to get the shot.